DVD Reviews

Rango - Blu-ray Review

By Jeff Swindoll Jul 17, 2011, 14:39 GMT

Get ready to tango with RANGO, a winner with critics and audiences that’s “like nothing you’ve ever seen before” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). Johnny Depp is spectacular as Rango, a kooky pet chameleon who gets tossed into a wild and raucous town in desperate need of a hero. Refreshingly original with eye-popping animation, RANGO is “loads of fun and genuinely funny” (Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times). And now you can ...more

Johnny Depp may be a cinematic chameleon but this time he steps into the skin and voice of an animated one that finds him in Sergio Leone territory.  The results are gorgeously animated for such an arid environment as well as being a delight. 

A Hawaiian shirt wearing chameleon (Johnny Depp) is fantasizing in his terrarium when it is bounced out of his owner’s car and onto a Mojave Desert freeway. 

The domesticated fish out of water, especially in the burning desert, encounters a philosophical armadillo named Roadkill (Alfred Molina) and is nearly eaten by a hawk. 

Roadkill advised him to head for a town called Dirt if he is to survive.  Along the way he meets an iguana named Beans (Ilsa Fisher) who gives him a ride into town.  The town of Dirt is barely surviving as their water supply, which they use for currency as well as sustenance, is drying up. 

Our hero wanders into a saloon, rechristens himself “Rango,” and weaves self-aggrandizing tales about what a western hero he is.

He accidentally slays the hawk from earlier in a way that makes his tales sound plausible so the tortoise Mayor (Ned Beatty) appoints Rango Sherriff of Dirt. 

When the town’s dwindled water supply is stolen, it sets Rango and his new friends out on a posse that will encounter the nasty gila monster Bad Bill (Ray Winstone), crooked kinfolk of mole Balthazar (Harry Dean Stanton), the Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant channeling Clint Eastwood), the villainous gunfighter Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), and finally the mystery of where the town’s water supply disappeared to. 

Director Gore Verbinski reteamed with his Pirates of the Caribbean star in this animated homage to the Western.  What sets Rango apart from other animated films is that it is fun for both adults and the kids. 

What other movie could get away with a reference to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?  My kids didn’t blink, but I was guffawing at that clever cameo.  It also helps that the film is superbly animated.  The desert may be barren and arid, but the animation by Industrial Light and Magic, who usually doesn’t handle CGI animation, is superb and brings majesty to the surroundings.

The characters are flawless and beautifully realized.  For example, they take the scales of Bad Bill and give him a whole new depth.  You may want to watch it through once for the story (and maybe for the kiddies) but you’ll want to return to closely examine all the backgrounds and characters. 

The voice cast is also superb with Depp brilliantly realizing Rango, Fisher offering a klutzy but loveable love interest, Beatty a surly manipulator, a near vocally unrecognizable Nighy a shady villain, and the rest also offering great elicitation.  As a fan of old Westerns, especially Sergio Leone, I was certainly in heaven with all the homage to the genre. 

Rango is presented in a 1080p high definition transfer (2.40:1).  Special features, presented in high definition, include an audio commentary with Verbinski, head of story James Ward Byrkit, production designer Mark “Crash” McCreery, animation director Hal Hickel, and visual effects supervisor Tim Alexander on the extended edition, a storyboard picture in picture reel on the theatrical version, the 49 minute “Breaking the Rules” behind-the-scenes, 8 minutes of deleted scenes, the 22 minute “Real Creatures of Dirt” about the desert animals that our animated characters represent, the 2 minute theatrical trailer, and the “Field Trip to Dirt” that allows you to virtually explore the town. 

Disc two is a DVD/digital copy. 

Rango works on so many levels: homage to Westerns, another role for Depp and a sterling vocal cast, a family film, but it also scores mightily in the beauty department with its gorgeously rendered setting and characters. 

The Blu-ray image is faultless and you will want to watch it again to catch all the visual references you may have missed.  Rango fires on all cylinders and is definitely a film to own on Blu-ray. 

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